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I finished The Shack a few days ago and true to my word I am sitting here trying to write up my reactions for you. It’s a little bit tough for me though because I feel forced to choose between one of two routes: I either go into great detail, picking and poring over each chapter and story nuance… or I don’t give any details at all. What I have decided though is that this entry is going to be as tightly connected to the book as I can manage, my earlier idea for a much longer thesis, On Religion or the like, having been tossed to the wind. There’s simply too much to say and no real point to having it said.

So instead we have: The Shack.

It is difficult to the point of impossible to write up any meaningful reaction to this book without actually discussing it. I don’t want to ruin the book for anyone, but you can take it on good faith that the plot of this book has very little to do with its purpose. The majority of the novel is told via a series of conversations and the “plot” exists solely to give those conversations a means of taking place.

Still, it is important that you don’t consider my opinion to be some objective, universal book review. I have certain feelings about the book, and I will give some of the reasons why, but I do not believe that those reasons will apply or that those feelings will exist for you. In fact, I would expect that some of you would love this book far more than I did. Similarly, I imagine that some of you would hate it more than I did too. The only way you can know is to read it yourself, but I just want to make sure that nobody uses this post to decide whether or not it is worth reading. The answer to that question is yes.

The reasons why are more complicated.

All right, well let’s just start with the short version and see if we don’t eventually find ourselves in the long…

And for those of you who haven’t read it (probably just about everyone) here is the brief synopsis, courtesy of the back of the dust jacket.

Mackenzie Allen Philips’s youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later, in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend.

Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever.

Not-really-a-spoiler Alert!! What he finds in the shack is a group of three people: God (in the form of a large black woman who likes to cook), Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Over the course of that weekend Mack has a whole bunch of conversations with the various members of the Holy Trinity as he struggles to regain his faith and come to terms with his daughter’s murder.

Okay, so the short version: I didn’t particularly like the book. At times it was ok, at times it was obnoxious to read, and at several points I wanted to put it down and never pick it back up. There were a few redeeming qualities – I didn’t hate the novel – but on a scale of one to ten I give it a solid four.

I gave it my best shot, but even before page one I was cringing a bit. The book starts with a foreword by the author (William Young) that sets up the story that is to follow. William tells us about his good friend Mack who claims to have spent a weekend with God. Unfortunately Mack isn’t much of a writer himself so he told the story to William and asked him to write it into a book so that others could hear his incredible story. Of course William couldn’t say no to his good friend.

And of course, none of that is actually true. Like A Million Little Pieces the book is a work of pure fiction told under the guise of a non-fiction memoir. However, unlike A Million Little Pieces this book actually admits its true-but-false nature from the very beginning. I’m sure a lot of people, author included, thought this was a brilliant literary device, but I completely disagree. The whole point of using a memoir is to make the story personal, right? Well, before Chapter 1 even begins I am three steps removed from the story: Mack to William to me. Moreover, since I know that the story is a work of fiction there is actually even more distance because the character William (who knows Mack) is not the same guy as William P. Young (the novel’s author) so the hierarchy of points of view goes Mack – William – Author William – me. It is a story about a guy, told by a guy, told by a guy, and because that story is repeatedly proclaimed to be the truth (often the kind with a capital “T”) I am left with the immediate, constant, and unshakable impression that I am being lied to.

Not a great start.

The other major literary gripe that I have with the book is that it is not especially well written. Just as the author/editor thought that the Russian Doll approach to nesting points of view was a good idea I imagine that they similarly high-fived at the constant use of sentences that sound clever but have absolutely no meaning. This is probably something that bothers me a lot more than it would bother any of you, but I tend to pay particularly close attention to syntax and the style in which an author constructs their sentences. In The Shack the author is frequently lazy – or maybe just bad – at crafting sentences and for me it seriously detracted from whatever impact the book might otherwise have had. For instance, at one point Mack finds himself talking to Sophia, an aspect of God’s wisdom. She is introduced as follows:

“Well, Mackenzie Allen Phillips,” she laughed, causing him to look up quickly, “I am here to help you.” If a rainbow makes a sound, or a flower as it grows, that was the sound of her laughter. It was a shower of light, an invitation to talk, and Mack chuckled along with her, not even knowing or caring why.

Come on, William P. Young… you have to be able to do better than that. Her laughter is the sound of a rainbow, eh? Terrific. I’m sure that description sounds great to someone, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. Honestly, I read that paragraph and closed the book, closed my eyes, and then shook my head for a few moments before pressing on again. I was already having a hard enough time identifying with the story’s characters by virtue of its narrative device; don’t make me work even harder by using descriptions that literally don’t describe.

Perhaps worse than that, though, after a particularly confusing series of dialog between Mack and God – of which there are many – Mack almost always blows off the whole exchange by saying some version of, “Ahh… I get it!” or “Yeah, it all makes sense now!” The problem there of course is that I almost never agreed with Mack; the conversations quite often didn’t make a whole lot of sense even after forcing myself to re-read them several times over. But hey, at least it all makes sense to Mack, and that’s what’s important.

Isn’t it??

Occasionally the author (or God, or Mack, or… somebody) actually has something particularly interesting to talk about, but even then it is not always for the reason the author probably intended. The following passage, like the one above, had me temporarily closing the book and thinking to myself, but in this case I almost laughed out loud.

Mack is having a conversation with Jesus…

Jesus paused, his voice steady and patient. “Like I said, I don’t create institutions; that’s an occupation for those who want to play God. So no, I’m not too big on religion,” Jesus said a little sarcastically, “and not very fond of politics or economics either.” Jesus’ visage darkened noticeably. “And why should I be? They are the man-created trinity of terrors that ravages the earth and deceives those I care about. What mental turmoil and anxiety does any human face that is not related to one of those three?”

Mack hesitated. He wasn’t sure what to say. This all felt a little over his head. Noticing that Mack’s eyes were glazing over, Jesus downshifted. “Put simply, these terrors are tools that many use to prop up their illusions of security and control. People are afraid of uncertainty, afraid of the future. The institutions, these structures and ideologies, are all a vain effort to create some sense of certainty and security where there isn’t any. It’s all false! Systems cannot provide you security, only I can.”

“Whoa!” was all Mack could think.

Ignoring the hilariously typical response from Mack, the irony of that passage is hopefully obvious. In my mind at least, the concept of God, and organized religion to a much greater extent, was created exactly in the way that Jesus here condemns. Fear of the future, fear of the unknown, the desire for security and control… it is just an illusion. “It’s all false!” says Jesus himself.

Anyways, that made me laugh.

I just noticed that I am running a bit long here so let me get into the last and most important aspect of the book that I had trouble with. I don’t think that the author is a good writer, and I blame the editor for letting him get away with it, but I forgive most of my issues of style and technique because from the very beginning I understood that the true value of this book is in its substance. The various lame narrative devices, including the plot, exist only to give scenery to the book’s main focus: the various conversations between Mack and God. This is why I can still recommend this book even after what I have written above.

In the end what will cause you to love, like, or hate this book is how you react to the dialogs. And as for my reaction? I have mixed emotions. More often than not I thought they were a waste of time, nothing more than pages upon pages of pure fiction passed off as fact. The real problem for me though is that the parade of fiction-as-fact was rarely much more than the author’s attempt to clarify the fiction-as-fact that I have already read in the Bible.

This is where many of us will disagree.

I don’t want to get into a theological debate right now, but without much explanation I will say that I regard the stories of the Bible to be almost entirely fictional. Parables with moral value, yes. The Word of God, no.

William P. Young, William the storyteller, and Mack all clearly regard the words of scripture to be intractable pieces of absolute truth and although he offers a very badly executed attempt at putting this Truth in a fictional memoir, the author’s message of “life only through Jesus” could not possibly be any clearer. The problem for me is that it’s a message that I really don’t care about.

Of course the author did himself a tremendous disservice by choosing the memoir as he did, which I have already mentioned, and so maybe the book would have had more impact if told in a different, better way. For instance, at one point Jesus says to Mack:

I came as a man to complete a wonderful picture in how we made you. From the first day we hid the woman within the man, so that at the right time we could remove her from within him. We didn’t create man to live alone; she was purposed from the beginning. By taking her out of him, he birthed her in a sense. We created a circle of relationship, like our own, but for humans. She, out of him, and now all the males, including me, birthed through her, and all originating, or birthed, from God.

Even though I don’t believe it to be actually, real-world, non-book true that Woman was made from Man’s rib, I find it especially NOT true when told by William’s William’s Mack’s Jesus. Everything about the story telling is a lie being pawned as a truth, so it is exceedingly difficult to not consider Jesus and his message to be a lie as well. The author simply has no credibility. Plus he’s not a good writer.

I am sure that none of that really even matters though. I don’t believe The Bible by God, I am certainly not going to believe The Shack by William P. Young. The story is mildly entertaining, a few of the messages have some accidental poignancy, and I laughed more than once (no thanks to the author to be sure) so the book is not completely worthless. Plus, I imagine that the level of appreciation for The Shack will only increase with its reader’s level of faith. Like I said before, I can imagine a lot of you really liking the book. What it won’t do, though the dust jacket implies otherwise, is instill faith where there wasn’t any before. Renew it, maybe. Invigorate it, probably. Create it… not so much.

Anyways, check it out for yourself and let me know what you think. I have an autographed copy of the book if anyone wants to borrow/have it.